New & Noteworthy

By GEORGE JOHNSON

Published: May 14, 1989

CHATTERTON, by Peter Ackroyd. (Ballantine, $8.95.) Keats wrote a sonnet to Thomas Chatterton, the young and unappreciated poet who killed himself in 1770 at the age of 17. Peter Ackroyd has made him a character in a story that takes place over three centuries and the result is ''a wonderfully vivid book,'' Denis Donoghue said here last year. SOMEONE WAS HERE: Profiles in the AIDS Epidemic, by George Whitmore. (Plume/New American Library, $8.95.) George Whitmore, the playwright and novelist, tells three true stories about victims of the AIDS virus. One is about a gay couple in Greenwich Village, one is about a Mexican-American mother who goes to San Francisco to bring her son home to Colorado to die, and one is about a hospital in the Bronx that treats infected drug addicts and their families. ''At their best, these snapshots give us crisp, sharp, well-focused glimpses of an almost impossibly large tragedy and help us begin to understand the disease,'' Stephen S. Hall said here last year. Mr. Whitmore died of AIDS on April 19. He was 43. MAMA DAY, by Gloria Naylor. (Vintage Contemporaries, $8.95.) On an isolated island off the coast of Georgia, a black matriarch named Mama Day exercises her magical powers. ''Gloria Naylor has written a big, strong, dense, admirable novel; spacious, sometimes a little drafty like all public monuments, designed to last and intended for many levels of use,'' Bharati Mukherjee said in The Book Review last year. THE LAST INTELLECTUALS: American Culture in the Age of Academe, by Russell Jacoby. (Noonday/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $9.95.) What, Russell Jacoby asks, ever happened to the likes of Edmund Wilson, Lewis Mumford and Malcolm Cowley? Instead of a new generation of versatile public intellectuals, we have specialists more interested in tenure and academic politics than in speaking to our cultural woes. Last year The Times's Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called this book narrow but absorbing. DALVA, by Jim Harrison. (Washington Square/ Pocket Books, $7.95.) In search of her lost illegitimate son, a middle-aged white woman leaves California for Nebraska and the land of the Sioux. ''The people in 'Dalva' emerge as full-blooded individuals, who almost incidentally embody much of the innocence, carelessness and urgency that played so large a part in the settling of this country,'' Michiko Kakutani said in The Times last year. ''Best of all, perhaps, are Mr. Harrison's descriptions of the land - the untamed deserts, plains, forests and arroyos of what was once the Western frontier.'' She said it is his best book since LEGENDS OF THE FALL, a collection of three novellas about revenge, which is being republished by Seymour Lawrence/Delta ($8.95). Delta is also reissuing four of Jim Harrison's novels, WOLF: A False Memoir, WARLOCK, A GOOD DAY TO DIE and FARMER, as well as his SELECTED AND NEW POEMS ($8.95 each). THE PEACEABLE KINGDOM: A Year in the Life of America's Oldest Zoo, by John Sedgwick. (Fawcett, $4.95.) For the good part of a year John Sedgwick observed the curious interactions between people and animals at the Philadelphia Zoo. Last year our reviewer, Harriet Ritvo, said the book is engaging and contains a ''wealth of fascinating anecdotes.'' AFTER DELORES, by Sarah Schulman. (Plume/New American Library, $7.95.) When her would-be lover Punkette, a go-go dancer in New Jersey, is murdered, the waitress who stars in this novel seeks the killer among the lesbian subculture of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Last year our reviewer, Kinky Friedman, said ''the book is as raw as fresh-shucked oysters and redolent with ragged charm. . . . Ms. Schulman writes with a stumbling grace, and she looks at the world from a fragile, refreshingly jaded angle.'' THE PRESENT AGE: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America, by Robert Nisbet. (Perennial/Harper & Row, $7.95.) The author believes that if the Founding Fathers were alive today they would be appalled by rampant militarism, big government and our decaying, materialistic culture. Robert Nisbet's arguments are forceful and eloquent but sometimes overstated, Richard Caplan said here last year. ''E'' IS FOR EVIDENCE, by Sue Grafton. (Bantam, $3.95.) Kinsey Millhone, the female sleuth in Sue Grafton's novel (there are four others, including '' 'D' Is for Deadbeat''), is framed when she investigates a fire in the Southern California town where she works as a private eye. This is ''the best detective fiction I have read in years,'' Vincent Patrick said in The Book Review in 1988. ELIA KAZAN: A Life, by Elia Kazan. (Anchor/Doubleday, $12.95.) Among the director Elia Kazan's movies are ''On the Waterfront,'' ''Viva Zapata,'' ''East of Eden'' and ''Splendor in the Grass.'' In this autobiography, which includes the story of his decision to name names before Senator Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee, is ''an indispensable account of American theater and film in our time and the impassioned testament of an artist who has done his valiant best to tell the truth about himself,'' Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said here last year. DOMESTIC REVOLUTIONS: A Social History of American Family Life, by Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg. (Free Press, $11.95.) Americans have bemoaned the decline of the family for three and a half centuries, but there is no sign that this resilient institution is going to fade away. ''In 'Domestic Revolutions' we see, in fresh detail, just how the family has adapted to the stress of unprecedented change and how it has endured,'' Glenn Collins said here in 1988.